


Big Fish, Little Fish

by ponybologna



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Attempted sexual assault in Shepard's past, F/M, Implied/Referenced Sexual Assault, Mass Effect AU, Solving relationship problems with violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-19
Updated: 2014-08-19
Packaged: 2018-02-13 19:00:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,521
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2161575
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ponybologna/pseuds/ponybologna
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The ocean is a big, scary place. To survive it, you have to be a big, scary creature. Like Shepard. Like Saren. They resort to the usual to solve their problems. Violence. [OLD WORK]</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Saren paced up and down a metal beam like a jungle cat, seawater lapping at his feet. Electric blue eyes burned into her as Mary ducked behind a rock.

“This is the only feasible option, Shepard!” he called. “Think of the Protheans. They fought, and they died for it. That is the greatest shortcoming of organics— we do not take odds or logic into account. We only operate on emotion!”

“There’s a reason for that!” Mary said back. “Odds are variables!”

A laugh escaped him. The sound was raw, crazy. They'd been at this for the better part of thirty minutes, and any path Mary took wound up dumping her right on her ass at the start line.

“Indeed, Shepard.” She chanced another look around the rock. Saren was staring right at her. His words were clear as day, even though he was around twenty feet from her. He had a voice that carried. “Odds vary. Tell me— what is the outcome when a krogan steps on an insect?”

She didn’t answer.

He said, louder, “What is the outcome of a _salarian_ stepping on an insect?”

Alright, _fuck_ this. She was clearly arguing with a brick wall here. Slowly (it was hard to move quietly in water) she started to move away from the rock. He kept talking.

“Odds may vary, but the outcome is still the same. The insect is crushed. It doesn’t care what kind of foot is coming down on it, it just dies. An entire race before us was erased, all because they fought. It’s an undeniable fact.” Mary ducked, inching along behind rock towards a pile of rubble about fifteen feet from Saren’s side.

“We can learn from their mistakes,” Saren continued. “Imagine how many lives could be saved if we surrendered. Is servitude not preferable to extinction? The only hope of survival is to join with them. Sovereign is a machine. It thinks like a machine. If I can prove my value, I become a resource, worth maintaining. The same must be done for the rest of us— there is no other logical conclusion. ”

“Really? _Really,_ Saren? A giant organic-killing robot from dark space is offering you immunity and you _listen_ to it?” She switched gears. “When I was nine, a pair of batarian creeps busted into my apartment, so I hid in the bathroom and locked the door. They said if I’d come out, they wouldn’t hurt me; they promised they’d just do what they wanted and then leave. They said they’d even give me a few credits. And did I come out? _No!_ I fucking didn't!,” she shouted. ”I climbed out the god damn window and ran, because no one is that stupid! Do you want to be dumber than a nine year old human girl?”

“Do not,” he snapped. “Draw _comparisons_ between us. This is entirely different from Omega scum—”

“Exactly! Instead of getting felt up by crusty batarians, you get to watch the entire galaxy get burnt to a crisp! We’re the Reapers’ sandbox and plastic dinosaurs!” She stood up from behind the rubble, gun dangling by her side. No sense in using it— the fucker would just use a biotic shield.

Saren’s eyes honed in on her, two pinpricks of white rimmed with blue.

“Would you sacrifice millions of lives for the sake of your prideful gamble?” he challenged. He didn’t seem to be aware that she was walking toward him. Or that she was palming a grenade. “Would you risk it? Would you take that chance? And if you did, and were wrong, _could you live with yourself?_ ”

“I’d be too dead to find out, and seriously, dude, you need to ask yourself that,” Mary said evenly, tossing the grenade forward.

Boiling water erupted around him, and she saw sun flash brilliantly against seawater and blue turian blood—blinding, white, hot—and she lunged and was on top of Saren before he hit the ground. He screamed as he went down, face ablaze with angry, burnt flesh and flashing metal. Mary pounded her fists into his shoulders, pinning him down. She groped for her pistol, found it, and jammed the muzzle under his chin. Saren kicked her viciously in the stomach, sending her flying backwards right when she pulled the trigger. A cryo round hit the water and exploded into a harmless mist of ice. She bounced up to her feet, right in time to receive a head-rocking punch to the face via robot arm. She lost hold of her gun and fell flat on her ass.

Stars and the words, _I fucking hate synthetic organic-hybrids,_ burst in her vision. Saren’s legs came into view, and she threw up her arms to protect the side of her head as he lashed her in the side of the head with his foot. Her ears rang from the blow. To the casual observer, it didn’t do much, but Mary knew it probably saved her from a broken jaw.

She couldn’t hear seawater or gunfire, just a loud keening as Saren came down on her, grabbed her head, and pushed her underwater.

_God damn fucking shit._ Her vision was a kaleidoscope of broken sunlight, water, and the electric blue eyes watching her die. She sucked in water, and choked, which made her suck in more water. Panic stabbed through her. Was this how it ended? She'd always thought drowning would be a peaceful way to go, but apparently not.

Abruptly, Saren lifted her up, fingers wrapped tight around her throat. She gagged and spit up seawater on his hand.

“This is the only option.” His voice was a disturbing mix of animalistic rage and something steely and inorganic. “You don’t see it, do you? I assumed that in _you_ of all people, I’d find some sense.” His grip on her throat tightened. The weight of her body, plus an additional hundred or so pounds of armor pulled down on her spine. Her head was getting tight, and what little air that was mixed with water in her lungs was running out. “We have a chance at survival, through servitude," he insisted.

“I’d rather die than be anyone’s slave,” she choked, water dribbling down her chin.

“You don’t get to make that choice for millions of people in this galaxy!” he growled. His hand closed more, and she breathed less.

“Neither do you!” Her voice came out strangled. He pulled her close, and her toes bounced off his shins.

“Do you see me?” he said lowly. “I am a hybrid. I have the benefits of both, and the weakness of neither. If I give it what it wants, it gives me what I want. We can _all_ be like this.”

“You’re off the walls.”

His face was suddenly inches from hers. The harsh light of his eyes stung.

“Sovereign needs me,” he repeated. “I can find the conduit; I can be a liaison between the Reapers and us. I can help us survive, if I do this right.”

“I don’t think you even realize how crazy you sound,” Mary wheezed. “You’re being brainwashed and your head is too far up your ass to even notice! Look at your fucking arm—”

_Arm._ The idea came to her in a halo of angelic light and choral singing.

His face contorted, baring needle-teeth. Mary lashed out and grabbed one of the cords feeding from his arm to his chest and pulled. Her limbs were heavy and weak, but she yanked it free. Blood and coolant spurted out, and Saren cried out and dropped her.

She scrambled back. Her fingers bumped into her pistol. Blue blood mixed with white coolant, steadily leaking out of the neat hole in his chest, coloring the water around him.

“See that? Did you ask for that? Did you ask for plastic guts, or did the Reaper suggest it?” Mary shouted. “This bastard is playing off your desire to protect and convincing you that you can make a deal with it! That’s how indoctrination works.”

“My mind is my own,” Saren snapped, advancing on her. “Sovereign has no control over me!” He came down on her in the same moment she trained the gun on the flesh between his shoulder and the cybernetics. She shot once, twice, even as he crushed her under his weight and clamped his jaws around her neck; three, four, five, times, until she emptied the clip. He snarled his pain through a mouthful of her shoulder meat.

“Feel that!?” she yelled, voice tight with pain. His teeth ripped at muscle and tendons. He punched her, hard, in the mouth. Blood and pain blossomed and saltwater rushed into her mouth to mix with the blood. She tossed her gun aside and grabbed his mandibles.

“Feel this!?” She wrenched them apart, away from his face. His blood was pouring freely onto her chest. “Don’t like it, do you?” she said through his cries of pain. “That’s what you _are_ , fucker, you’re flesh and blood and you _shit in the woods like the rest of us!_ ”

“I’m _trying_ —” She pulled harder on his mandibles. He screamed, and rammed his forehead into her chin. Her teeth slammed shut and chomped down on her tongue. _Jesus fuck dammit, you’re turning me into fucking Swiss cheese,_ she thought.

“You’re thinking like a two year old! What would you have done if you were cornered in my bathroom by those batarians? What would you have done!?”

“I don’t know!”

“ _What would you have done!?_ ” she screamed.

_“I DON’T KNOW!”_ he roared.

The silence that came after was crushing. They were both breathing hard, racked with pain and exhaustion.

“Not this, huh?” she breathed, smearing blood and coolant on her glove, and holding it up so he could see the blue marbled with white. “You wouldn’t open the fucking door for those batarians if they said they’d promised you a _fucking_ cookie, would you?”

“This isn’t even _remotely_ like—”

“It is,” she interrupted. Her words were blunted by injury and blood. “Reapers, batarians; they’re all bigger fish.” She grabbed the sides of his head and pulled him down so she could see right into his eyes, through his little light-up pupils and, if she pretended, directly into his brain. Having those sharp turian teeth and hard forehead—hell, maybe he even had a mouth laser— so close to her face was a risk. But she’d always liked to gamble. She’d always been good at it.

“You know what we do when bigger fish push us around?” He looked at her. His eyes were dimmer, and she thought they might’ve been grey once— ordinary grey. He almost looked normal, like that, breathing hard with tired eyes and beaten, though _normal_ and _smeared with blood_ were usually on entirely different ends of the football field.

“ _Do you know what we do?”_ she repeated.

“What?” His voice was a soft snarl. Her fingers tightened around his jaw and she pulled him down, so he’d hear her.

“We climb up the food chain,” she whispered.


	2. Chapter 2

She found him in a bar, out where neither bounty hunters nor military ships could find him.

It wasn’t exactly a chance meeting, seeing how she’d stuck a tracker deep in the coils of his circuitry, but no one but Mary had to know that.

He was standing, hand braced against the bar. He tossed back a shot of something bright and acid green. A shudder ran through him. He shook his head. There were a few empties around him of different sizes; he’d been drinking for a while now, apparently.

“Hey, arch-nemesis,” she said, leaning her back and elbows on the bar beside him. A smug smile tugged at her lips when he flinched.

Without looking up, he growled, “What do you want?”

“Nothing, really. Just wanted to catch up with the galaxy’s biggest asshole.” She looked him up and down. “You look like hell.”

Turians didn’t pale, and they didn’t bruise on their harder plating, but somehow, he looked… well, shitty. He hadn’t done much with his wounds other than digging out the bullets and tying off severed cords. A dried coating of medigel glistened here and there in the bar’s dim red lighting.

“ _Hypocrite,”_ he said, but there was no malice in his voice. She was still decked out in full badass bitchery, and judging from the looks she was getting, she looked the part. The right side of her face was purple and swollen, damn him, and the bites and red welt around her neck were layered in bandages and medigel. He looked at them, assessing the damage he’d dealt. Considering the fact she wasn’t torn up into bloody strips floating around Virmire's lovely coastal waters, she guessed he wasn’t satisfied with his work.

“Drinking on the job? What’s Sovereign gonna say?”

Saren didn’t take the bait. He just turned back to the empty glasses before him.

“Thinking about what I said?” she snorted. “Couple of alien mystery shots always helps me in the mental department.”

He gave her a look that was pure ice.

“Go away until it’s time for us to try to kill each other again.”

She said nothing, just watched him trace a claw around the rim of a shot glass. It was bizarre, to be standing so close to her arch-nemesis and having an ordinary conversation. Well, ordinary for Shepard. There was no gunfire or chaos or teammates dying around her. No geth. No crazy rambling about survival through servitude. It was like sitting in a dream.

“I don’t feel real,” he said suddenly. Mary raised an eyebrow.

“Not real? Just take a look at what you did to my face, jackass. That’s plenty real.”

“You’re not real either,” he said blankly.

"I'm pretty sure I am."

“I am seeing things, and doing things, but it doesn’t register," he continued, as if she hadn't said anything. "Pain registers, Sovereign registers, but nothing else.”

“What does it feel like?” she asked after a pause. He sighed. Air hissed through the perforations in his mandibles.

“I am… Asleep. Or underwater. I realize—if I can concentrate on these for a while,” he gestured to his wounds. “—as soon as I stop focusing on the pain, I realize I hear whispers. They’ve gotten loud, without my notice.” The last word was weighed down with disgust.

“Like when you turn up the heat in your shower so slowly you don’t realize how hot it is?” Mary asked. _I cannot believe I am having this conversation. I should just shoot him in the mouth._

Saren sighed again.

“Something akin to that.”

They lapsed into silence again. Somewhere in the bar, a woman shrieked with laughter.

“The council was going to give you to me for training, if you passed Nihlus’s inspection,” he said. “I’d have still hated you,” he added. “I’d have still probably tried get you killed, or just offed you myself. But now, I don’t know how much of that desire is mine, and how much is Sovereign’s. It keeps telling me you’re wrong, and that if I continue on this way, I’ll save a handful of lives, regardless of what you say.”

“Only a handful?” she prompted.

“Not everyone will submit. You of all people should know that,” he said, giving her a deadpan look. He turned away. “But some is better than none.”

“Yeah. And how’s the drinking helping you?” she asked dryly.

“I don’t know,” he said quietly. “I still don’t feel real, but… My thoughts are slower and quieter. It’s better, like this.”

Mary turned around so she was facing the bar, ass pointing out. She linked her fingers together. She didn't like what he was saying, because, once upon a time, the same thoughts chased themselves in circles inside her head.

“Still sticking with it?”

“I don’t know,” Saren said. “I don’t know why I am doing this. Granted, I don’t know why I’m still breathing and existing, or what the point of this is, but. It doesn’t make as much _sense_ to me. Too many scrambled parts, conflicting promises…”

“Can you still hear Sovereign?” she asked. She told herself she didn’t know why she was here. She told herself she should pin him to the bar and shoot him in the neck. But this was why she was here; to ask this question. She wouldn’t admit, not even to herself, because Mary was a prideful fuck who wasn’t above belittling herself, was that she wanted to know if he could be saved. She didn’t give a damn about Saren— he was and always would be a morally compromised, racist, vicious shitstraw— but she was worried for others. Chief among those people being herself. She’d woken up too many times, slick with sweat and head full of pudding, blinking red lights, and empty space, hearing a voice in her dreams telling her things she did _not want to hear._ She wanted to be safe. At the end of the day, she had to go home, at whatever cost.

“Yes. I can’t make out the words, though. It’s just mumbling.” His words were slurring and colliding together. The alcohol was starting to catch up with him. He gave her a long, hard look. “I should kill you.”

“Go ahead and try. I promise I won’t kick you in the stomach and make you puke.”

He sighed, and maybe his heart (or whatever turians had) wasn’t in it, but he reached for his pistol. Mary, who’d made it triumphantly to the age of 24 by not making assumptions, reached out and jammed her thumb deep into wires and tender flesh. He cried out and doubled over the bar.

“Remember that?” she said.

“ _Stop,_ ” he whined. He looked sick. Mary dug her thumb in deeper, until blood welled up under her finger. His hand shot out and grabbed her throat, crushing the tender, bruised flesh in his hand.

“Feel it?” she gasped.

“Feel _what?_ ” He snarled. “I feel your _filthy little hand_ stabbing into me.”

“Yeah, and I feel like I’m deepthroating a krogan.”

He leaned in, teeth bared. “Your point being?”

“You wanna kick my ass, don’t you?” she laughed.

“Yes.” An incredible amount of venom was forced into that one syllable.

“Feels better, like this, huh? You wanna kick my ass right now because I’m fingering one of your bullet holes, not because robo-squid is telling you to.” She tried to adjust his grip on her throat with her free hand, but all he did was tighten it. “Imagine this, except ten million times more painful,” she gasped.

“I know.” There was a snarl and the sound of teeth slamming shut at the last word. “I’ve felt pain you can’t even begin to imagine.”

“Been tortured?” she pressed, digging her finger in further. “Burned? Shot? Had your skin peeled off your meat?”

“ _Yes,”_ he hissed. He was close enough to lunge and bite her nose off. His breath stank of alcohol and the metal of his hand was warming up from contact with her skin. She wanted to cry. She wanted to throw up. But she kept going, because she wanted her answer.

“Did they break you? _Did they break Saren Arterius?”_ She twisted her thumb, farther, deeper. Blood was dribbling freely now. Her head was starting to swim.

“Does it look like they did?” he said viciously.

“You’ve been shot, cut, stabbed, burned, drowned, thrown out windows, frozen, starved, strangled, and beaten bloody with your own weapons.”

“What. Is. Your. _Point?_ ”

“You gonna let a persuasive space-squid be the one to break you?” she wheezed. He went completely still.

“A drunk man is an honest man. Tell me, Arterius.”

He shoved her away, eyes wild. One hand went to her gun, another to massage her throat.

“Never,” he said defiantly.

“Have you ever failed a mission, you son of a bitch?”

“Never,” he said again. She shoved him, hard.

“Is today the day you let everyone die because someone _talked you into it?”_

“ _Never,”_ he said, louder this time. She reached forwards and grabbed a tangle of tubing, and twisted, hard. The light in his eyes flared, but he didn’t move a muscle. She yanked, squeezed, even whipped out her combat knife and cut a few slits in the cords, but the only sound she got out of him was a grunt.

“Is this the worst thing that’s ever been done to you?” she demanded, stepping up so she was in his face. She only came up to his chin.

“No, you _imbecile_ ,” he growled.

“What do you want to do more than anything?”

“To complete my mission and then _put you in your place._ ”

She gave another sharp tug on a cord before letting go. Her palm was slick with coolant and blood now. That made twice, in the past forty-eight hours.

“You think you can beat me, you old prick?” she said. Their armored chests touched.

“ _I’m sure of it,”_ he said.

She wiped her palm off on his chest. “Prove it to me, fucker. There ain’t shit you can do to me if I’m a piece of laser-fried Reaper bacon.”


End file.
